It is clear that the nVidia nForce4 platform has become the chipset of choice for the AMD Athlon 64 platform for the moment, however, we are starting to see ULi coming up with chipsets that are not only powerful, but are offering the same features and the nForce4 at a cheaper price. This is why we are starting to see a drop in nVidia's pricing on NF4 SLI chipsets, and why we are now seeing budget motherboards for K8 with SLI support.

Albatron has done a very good job in terms of its implementation of the NF4 SLI. One thing that impressed us was no SLI adjustment card that you normally see, however, this is done not though a SLI digital switch like MSI and ASUS now have, but by actually routing the two PCI-E x16 slots with only 8 lanes each. When only using a single graphics card, you will find that it will only run in PCI-E x8 mode, this is why we believe we had a slight drop in gaming performance. You will notice performance decreases more when you're running at a high resolution with AA and AF turned on, at 1024 x 768 with no AA and AF and medium quality settings for example, you likely won't see much performance penalty.

Overall we found that Albatron's past implementations have been rather impressive, and this motherboard is no exception - if you want budget SLI, the Albatron K8SLI is one to really consider.

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